From Clarence Thomas bantering about pubic hairs on Coke cans, to Harvey Weinstein spilling his seed into a potted plant, we’ve had more than a quarter-century of teachable moments on sexual harassment. Every news cycle for the past four months has brought yet another revelation of once-important men falling rapidly into the abyss because they used their power to sexually harass female colleagues and subordinates. Surely by now, guys must get it, right?
No, not all of them. Not by a longshot. Sadly, it appears that many men extracted a bizarrely distorted lesson from the never-ending trail of #metoo stories. Professing profound confusion over how to avoid career-ending sexual harassment accusations, these organizational wizards have decided to keep their distance from women in the workplace, afraid that they might be branded as a sexual harasser. As a result, women are being kept out of key meetings, held back from crucial out-of-town trips and denied mentoring, all essential building blocks to career advancement in most organizations.
No good reckoning, it seems, goes unpunished. Consider, for example, these recent developments:
Major companies are telling men not to take female colleagues on business trips and even banning them from sharing rental cars with women coworkers.
Male investors in Silicon Valley are declining one-on-one business meetings with women.
Private work meetings with colleagues of the opposite sex were found to be inappropriate by a quarter of respondents in a recent poll.
A Texas public official was reprimanded last month for refusing to meet with female employees and ending his regular mentoring sessions with one of them.
Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook told of many men in the business community reacting to the #metoo phenomena by saying, “This is why you shouldn’t hire women.”
Then there is Dr. Mukund Komanduri, a Chicago area orthopedic surgeon who says he now stands at least 10 feet away from female colleagues and avoids being alone with them. He told the New York Times, “I’m very cautious about it because my livelihood is on the line. If someone in your hospital says you had inappropriate contact with this woman, you get suspended for an investigation, and your life is over. Does that ever leave you?”
Really, Doctor? Have we been reading the same stories? These guys were flashing their penises and groping, grabbing and forcibly tonguing their female associates. That’s why you can’t consult with a woman resident over a hip replacement procedure? Give me a break!
To be sure, this insipid overreaction has not been universal. Not every man has adopted the Mike Pence protective shield of never being alone with a woman other than his wife. But it has been widespread enough to spawn new corporate training programs, including one on “safe mentoring” which teaches male executives “how to mentor young women without harassing them”. Let that one sink in for a moment. That’s like teaching bank employees how to handle money without stealing it.
The #metoo effort has been enormously effective in shining a spotlight on the depth and pervasiveness of sexual harassment, but it is, by no means, a cure for all that plagues women in most workplaces. That will come only when they are on at least equal footing with men in running those workplaces. Yet, if the response to sexual harassment is to hire and promote fewer women and further marginalize the ones who are there, the goal posts of gender equality will have been moved back to the 1950s.
Not surprisingly, studies show that companies with the lowest incidence of sexual harassment are those where women hold at least half the key leadership positions. Conversely, consider the example of Amazon. One of the first post-Weinstein casualties involved Amazon executive Roy Price. He left the company late last year after accusations that he made repeated and unwanted sexual advances on a woman at a corporate social function. It turns out that the full episode had been reviewed by Amazon in 2015, and Price was told to drink less at company parties. Amazon is run by an elite group of 16 senior executives. Fifteen of them are men. It’s hard to imagine the same outcome if women had dominated the corporate leadership.
Unfortunately, there aren’t many of those places.
One recent investigation showed that women hold 46 percent of the entry level positions in large corporations, but only a small fraction of the key management jobs. There is an abundance of reasons for turning this around. Egalitarian organizations have not only been found to be more effective, but also more profitable.
So what’s the holdup? Power, mostly, specifically the power of male privilege. Numbers are power, as sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter noted in her seminal research decades ago. As long as women are, as Kanter put it, “the few among the many” in an organization, they remain underpaid, under-promoted and at a distinct disadvantage to change the dominant culture that enables sexual harassment.
Therein lies the quandary. In order to eradicate sexual harassment from our workplaces, we need to infuse more women into the leadership strata of those organizations. How do you that when anxious men are excluding female coworkers from the very activities that can lead to the advancement pipeline? Do we need more training? Maybe seminars that make it clear to these insecure males that, as long as they don’t act like they are in a pick-up bar at last call, it’s all right to work with women and treat them as equals? Seems like an incredulous message for 2018. But clearly, there are way too many guys who still don’t get it.